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Tag Archives: film reviews

Movie Review: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Megan in Reviews, Vampires

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, artsy movies, Farsi, female vampires, feminism, feminist, film reviews, films, indie films, indie flicks, Iran, Iranian, movie review, movie reviews, movies, vampire movies, vampires

In recent weeks, I viewed the art house film, “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”. In case you haven’t heard of it, this Ana Lily Amirpour directed movie received a lot of buzz for being a Farsi-language (which is the main tongue of Iran) art house flick about a vampire in a Western-style city. In fact, the movie’s tagline is “The first Iranian Vampire Western”.

Click here to learn more at IMDB.com

Click here to learn more at IMDB.com

Even though the film is done in Farsi, it was not shot in Iran. Instead, it was made here in the United States by a cast and crew of Iranian heritage. That is quite obvious when you see the sex scenes and female nudity. I mean, this is not a movie that the Ayatollah would approve of!

“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is about a fictional place called Bad City. And bad is the best word to describe it. Drug dealing, spousal abuse, prostitution, and just general unhappiness and misery all around. Having the film shot in black and white seems to add to the sadness of Bad City, along with the artsy intentions of the director.

But while the residents of Bad City are dealing with their unhappiness, they seem unaware of a particular young woman who is by herself at night. They might notice her, because this is supposed to be Iran, and in that country, a young woman being by herself at that hour is taboo. She may be up to no good. And this girl is. She’s a vampire.

But she’s no evil vampire. Instead, the young woman seems to use her thirst for blood as a way to punish those in Bad City who hurt others. She kills and drinks from the drug dealers, the pimps and all others who abuse women. Come to think of it, this characterization of a female vampire seems to be a trend with the genre. The film, Byzantium, had something similar. And one of my author buddies, Francis Franklin, wrote a book that had the same idea. It’s like female vampires are the new female warriors against male oppression, and other injustices from patriarchal societies.

At the center of “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is Arash, a young man who’s father shoots up heroin, owes money and abuses his girlfriend. The vampire watches this very closely, and it is while she’s watching that Arash meets her and falls in love. She becomes a beacon of light for him in his unhappy existence in an unhappy place. This is rather unusual yet touching vampire romance, although the love story is a secondary storyline here. Arash is basically a rebel in Bad City in a sense that he yearns to escape its misery and live a better life.

Overall, the film is about how rough Bad City is and how this vampire (who has no name) uses her vampire ways to bring justice. It’s an artsy, indie flick that brings together Iranian social issues, vampire fascination, and classic American flicks about teenage rebellion. It doesn’t have a driving storyline, but it is interesting to watch. The real catch is the Iranian aspect of the film, which why it received such a buzz among indie flicks recently. For one thing, I liked how the vampire’s chador seems to represent both Iran’s strict clothing laws for women, and the capes traditional vampires wear. It’s actually a cool combination when you think about it.

I recommend this film if you like foreign language flicks, indie art-house style films, and a feminist take on female vampires. If you love cinematography, you’d love this film. But if you are looking for a driving storyline with intense climaxes and drama, you won’t see too much of that here. But it is something different from many vampire and Iranian films out there, so this may be a movie worth watching for you!

 

 

Movie Review: Mama

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by Megan in Entertainment

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

film reviews, horror films, horror flicks, horror movies, Jessica Chastain, Mama, movie, movie reviews, movies, scary movies, suspense

I’ve doing this blog for nearly a year and a half, and I noticed I haven’t done a movie review yet. I’ve done book reviews and discussed my favorite TV shows. So I guess I better add movies to the list, no? 🙂

Click here for the film's IMDB page

Click here for the film’s IMDB page

Since Halloween is upon us, I arranged my Netflix queue so I would get the horror flick, “Mama” over the weekend rather. Usually I don’t watch horror because I can’t handle gore. Luckily there was none of that here, which made the movie easy to watch.

There were a lot of jumping-out-of-your-seat, blink-and-you-miss-it, watching-behind-the-main-character moments in this film. The special effects used to create Mama were creepy as well as excellent. There’s a lot of chilling knocks and tapping sounds, and some good dream sequences explaining the story.

I thought Jessica Chastain was great as she usually is. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was also good, though I was really thrown off in the beginning over which character he was playing (turns out he was playing both the father and the uncle to the two young girls). But the actresses who portrayed the young girls, Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse, were the highlight. I didn’t feel as though neither of them failed to bring their characters to life, and if had that happened, this movie wouldn’t have succeeded.

I felt there were too many dark scenes here and I couldn’t understand why the uncle would go to the log cabin alone at night without a single flashlight. Worst of all, there were a lot of plot holes. I felt the back story which explained how the girls ended up in the cabin as toddlers was overdeveloped because I kept wondering what connection their malicious father had to Mama. And there were other issues that weren’t further developed or explained. They don’t ruin the storyline altogether, but I was left saying, “what, huh?!”

I had trouble with the ending. It made sense, it fit with the story and Mama and all…but I felt so unsettled about it. I won’t say how it goes, but it involves one of the girls and its just…you know, not right, even though it is right from a storytelling point of view, and also for the movie’s genre. If you choose to see this film, you’ll get what I mean.

Overall, not bad of a movie. The acting was fantastic, the effects were wonderful, and there were moments that made me cringe with suspense. It had its flaws which luckily didn’t overwhelm the whole movie. So I will give Mama 3.5 out of 5 stars. Yes, I know that .5 may not be acceptable for some, but I can’t give this 4 stars because of the ending. But I also feel it doesn’t deserve a 3 star. So 3.5 it is! 😛

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